BoxRec

When do you think that started ?
( i.e Heroin, Cocaine, Red Devils etc )

how about 95 percent of the 80s heavyweights

Back in the "Old Days" ( i.e 1950's)
It seems Boxers usually waited until they retired from boxing to do drugs.
( or at least were exposed to them )

Mike Ayala said he used heroin the day he challenged Danny Lopez for the title.

It was rumoured that Sonny Liston had at one point became a Heroin addict
at least around the time he fought Muhammad Ali in May 1965.

Mando Ramos, Aaron Pryor.

The first Boxer/contender I can remember whose boxing career
was plagued by drug use would be Jeff Merritt aka "Candy Slim".
that was back in the early 1970's.

I'm sure there were a bunch we will never hear about. Just thinking about Kronk and the Detroit area fighters, Alvin "Too Sweet" Hayes went down the tubes due to cocaine (that his manager blamed as "Anemia") and Leslie "Sweet Lemonade" Gardner crashed a promising career due to heroin and died very young of an OD while still active as a fighter.

I think I had read were Stanley Ketchel had become addicted to opium the last year of his life.

In the first half of the 20th century, rudimentary performance-enhancing drugs were used by corner men on their fighters, either before a fight or in the one-minute rest period between rounds. State Boxing Commissions publicly stated the use of stimulants was strictly a personal decision between the boxer and his handler’s. Strychnine, commonly used as rat poison, was used in small doses to stimulate the central nervous system. Contents in a corner man’s bag of tricks also included a mixture of brandy and cocaine, or wine and spirits of ammonia (smelling salts).

Max Baer would garner headlines nationwide at an August 1934 testimonial dinner in Oakland before 300 attendees, when he stated "Carnera's gloves looked big because of the strychnine given me before the fight." Though the audience clearly heard him use the word, he later said it was a slip of the tongue. He said he meant to say he was given cherry wine and spirits of ammonia.

Oakland Tribune 28 Aug 1934 p16

Sugar Ray Leonard and Gatti dabbled I do believe

Pernell Whitaker

I suppose we got David Benavidez right now